Riverbed delivers a hardware refresh and a bold new direction. But the continued use of proprietary appliances and the blurring of the lines between IT and storage silos will make adopting the technology very difficult for IT.

Cisco was dropped from the Leader quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant on WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs ) while Silver Peak was added to the prestigious list.Gartner's Magic Quadrant is one of the more thorough, independent analyses in the WAN optimization market today.

Part of the challenge in optimizing applications is knowing where to begin. Lori MacVittie would like to have us believe that the right approach is to deploy a holistic application delivery solution to address the entire problem.

In an odd turn of events, some of the most vocal anti-tunneling companies are now advocating the use of tunnels again. At the beginning of the month, application acceleration vendor Riverbed added UDP tunneling in the newest releases of its RiOS 7.

InfoTech Research Group recently completed a survey where it evaluated the value provided by WAN optimization vendors, which provides insights in what to do - and not to do - when identifying the value of networking equipment.As a veteran of the speed-and-feed wars of networking gear, I was happy to see that InfoTech put its finger on the essential issue in picking a piece of networking equipment - value.

In another life and another time, I ran the network testing program at PC Magazine. Back then, Mag (as it was called) evaluated application and device performance primarily on 10Mbps (gasp) or later a 100Mbps Ethernet link -- pretty much the state of the art then.

As partners listened to Microsoft’ spiel at Microsoft WPC today, they may ask themselves the same question that any Google follower should be asking as well – with all of this talk about video, how is your network possibly going to keep up? From Google+ to Lync to Facebook, application developers are rushing to embed video into the social , collaborative experience.

Last week we heard from innovation veteran David Croslin and author of Innovate the Future: A Radical New Approach to IT Innovation, about some of his thoughts separating innovation from invention and pitfalls facing organizations when they institute innovation programs.One of the items Croslin touched on as we were speaking was the real value behind innovation management platforms - such as Accept Software, BrightIdea, Element8, Imaginatik, Kindling, Qmarkets.

A new trend in innovation management (aka ideation) platforms that I'm seeing I think will mark the beginning of the next generation of our industry. With them you'll be able to help your organizations move from creative brainstorming to implementation in a far easier and more effective way than today.

Innovation software platforms aren't just the domain of Fortune 500 organizations even local government is getting into the act. I recently has the opportunity with Chris Vein, CIO for the city and county of San Francisco, about an effort to use crowdsourcing to address some of the city's woes.

One of the more interesting twists to come out of a recent conversation I had with Paul Pluschkell, the CEO of Spigit, was a novel way they're working with Cisco to change employee Web surfing habits. Web surfing habits are a big concern of organizations today.